The intranet website is supposed to create a word document client-side from templates
server-side and let the client edit it.
The code that worked in office 2007 doesn't work any more and I can't find any way to do it on google.
I used this code lines which was the only code i did find in google and still nothing
dim appWord
set appWord = New Word.Application
can anyone tell me how to create a word app object that works with word 2010.
thx in advance.
Edit: I need the object to be able to takes parts from various word documents and copy paste them into a single document in a certain formation
You can use the open xml sdk to create and edit office documents, see: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=5124
Although the download page says office 2007, it works for 2010 as well.
Related
I'm currently working on a project where I have to transfer an existing VB program into a Server Application using ASP.NET.
While I had success doing that there's one thing that I'm struggeling with:
The VB Program was using Microsoft Word Interop to generate Excel files and fill Word Templates with data. While i managed to be able to generate the files locally with Interop I can't get it to work for somebody that is accessing the Application from a client.
I also tried using OpenXML to solve my problem but somehow it always said that the file is corrupt after I tried to fill the bookmarks.
In the end the user shoud be able to download the Word document filled with the necessary data.
What would be the best solution for this problem?
If you have mostly the same document structure, you can prepare the whole document in Word. Set placeholders in the document like {Placeholder1} {Placeholder2}, parse the XML and Replace the Placeholders with your text, so you must not generate the whole document structure. Only Replace the Placeholders with your text.
I have requirement where I need to allow users to upload a Word document with place holders for certain fields which can be found in the database. This will be their template. For example the place holders might be prepended with ## or something. For example
Dear ##Title ##Lastname
They then can grab a record and hit export to Word document. This will then let them choose the template. They can select the template and then click continue. I will then get the template and replace the ##Title with the title field in the database for the selected record. I am not sure where to start or what components I need to do this.
From my initial investigation it seems that I can do this with the new open XML standard for Office 2007. So perhaps I should read in the template and save all the contents to a db table somewhere. Then when the use wants to export I get the contents again and then do a search and replace for the ## placeholders and link them properly. Then save the document to the output stream again which will then bring up the save dialog on their browser.
I am using ASP.Net MVC and am in a hosted environment. I was also maybe contemplating dynamically creating a new View type and dynamically creating new views when the user uploads a template. Not sure that this approach will work though.
Is this a good approach?
What tools should I be looking at?
Any other suggestions?
This is similar to an approach we took for inserting data into word documents and then returning them to the user. We opened the .docx file (it's a zip file so easy to extract) extracted the document (in the word folder called document.xml), did the replace and then put the document back into the .docx file and returned it to the user.
An issue we hit were that word inserted tags at strange places, especially things like spell/grammar errors, so we needed to be careful when we did the search/replace.
We decided not to store the fields from the document in a database to allow the documents to be easily updated.
We used dotnetzip component for opening the .docx files
Something we also did was to combine several documents into a single large document to save on the number of downloads. If I remember we used the open xml toolkit to do this merging. The website has also got loads of other information that may be of use.
Check out Scott Guthries blog post about the new view engine code named "Razor" coming out real shortly from Microsoft. In the comments there is talk about it being able to be used in mail merge scenarios like you talk about with ASP.NET MVC views.
The purpose is to generate proposal documents that can manually be edited in Word after the fact, but before sending them out to the customers.
Much proposal content would be drawn from existing HTML website content (backing CMS) and also some custom (non-HTML) injection for certain scenarios. Of course the conditional logic could go into server-side ASP.NET to vary the content appropriately.
I'm open to 3rd-party tools if raw manipulation of the Word API is arduous. In fact a good 3rd party tool might be the answer.
Use the Aspose Words component for .Net.
Aspose Words Component Link
The component natively understands the Microsoft Word file format without having to install any Microsoft Office products on your application environment. You can then start from an existing word template or programatically build up an entire Microsoft Word document from scratch. The Word object model then allows you to export to doc / docx etc and save as a native Word file to wherever you required.
They have plenty of demos set up on their website.
I've not used any third-party tools before, as I've only ever written Office automation applications for PCs which already have Office installed.
Creating documents from scratch, or basing them on a template, is quite straightforward. With templates, you can define bookmarks and mail-merge fields to make finding and replacing document elements easier.
Here's a few things that you may find useful:
Named and Optional Arguments
The Word object model is reasonably easy to work with. VB.NET used to be easier to work with than C#: as the Office automation APIs were originally written with VB in mind, you could take advantage of optional parameters. In earlier versions of C#, you had to specify every argument in API calls, which was quite tedious. I understand that this has changed in Visual C# 2010:
How to: Use Named and Optional Arguments in Office Programming (C# Programming Guide)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264738.aspx
Tutorials
I found these tutorials quite handy:
Automating Office Programs with VB.NET
http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/showthread.php?t=160433
VB.NET Office Automation FAQ
http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/showthread.php?t=160459
Understanding the Word Object Model from a .NET Developer's Perspective
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa192495%28office.11%29.aspx
Early and Late binding
One point worth mentioning: late-binding is normally recommended against, but it can be very useful if you don't know what version of Office will be deployed on the application's host. Early-binding tends to operate faster, and has the advantage of intellisense in your IDE:
Using early binding and late binding in Automation
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/245115
Early vs. Late Binding
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/interdev/earlyvslatebinding.htm
Search and Replace
One thing to be aware of is that the find and replacement objects may not work as you would expect. Rather than searching the whole document, it searches just the main text. If you have text frames in the document, these will be ignored. Instead, you have to loop through all the StoryRanges, and search the content of each. Here's what I do in VB.NET to search the main text story and text frames:
Private Sub FindReplaceAll(ByVal objDoc As Object, ByVal strFind As String, ByVal strReplacement As String)
Dim rngStory As Object
For Each rngStory In objDoc.StoryRanges
Do
If rngStory.StoryType = wdMainTextStory Or rngStory.StoryType = wdTextFrameStory Then
With rngStory.Find
.Text = strFind
.Replacement.Text = strReplacement
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Execute(Replace:=wdReplaceAll)
End With
End If
rngStory = rngStory.NextStoryRange
Loop Until rngStory Is Nothing
Next rngStory
End Sub
StoryRanges Collection Object
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb178940%28office.12%29.aspx
I have a long history regarding document generation and mail merge. In the old days we were using Office COM extensively even in server side (ASP) applications. In years we have learnt that this approach was causing many problems and today I’m always advocating against using Office COM (Word automation) in almost any scenario.
With the Microsoft’s introduction of Open XML SDK we managed to create a solid mail-merge component that was many times faster and much more robust than the solution(s) with Office COM. In my experience Open XML SDK allows a developer to create a solid solution, but it takes a lot of effort and time to make it useful and robust.
There are several good document generation/processing libraries on the market. We later ended up purchasing one and in my opinion creating your own solution (based on Open XML SDK or Office COM) simply never pays off.
Currently we are using Docentric Toolkit which is a general purpose document processing library and even better template-based/mail-merge toolkit for .NET. It allows template design in MS Word and then populating them with application data and producing final documents in different formats.
You can look into using XSL to generate some WordML.
This technique is definitely convoluted but gives you a lot power in your layout.
You don't need any 3rd party controls to create a Word document. From 2007 and onward Word can read html as a word document. You simply save any web page with the ".doc" extension and Word will sort it out.
Simply create your web page with whatever formatting you want then save it with a .doc extension.
I used HttpWebRequestto call the Url (with parmaters) to my page then used WebResponse and Stream to get my page into a buffer, then StreamReader and StreamWriter to save it to an actual document. I've then got my own custom function to download the file.
If anyone wants my code let me know
I have an web application which serves SQL reporting services reports via the reportviewer control. Because of the complexity of some of the reports I use rdlc reports attached to business objects.
Now I would like to expand the system and allow some form of user-defined reports. Ideally I would like the users to connect their reports to the same business objects I use to create the rdlc reports.
Is there a control that allows users
to create/edit their own rdlc files?
Can rdl files be attached to
business objects?
Any hints/tips for writing my own
control to edit rdlc files? (I would
think this is a lot of work
and would only attempt if there is
no suitable answer to 1 or 2).
All my development has been done in VS 2005 with SQL 2005 but I could upgrade if new features in 2008 help with the solution.
This isn't much of an answer, but at my company I have put together our own Report Builder.
We have about 30 or so Reporting Service reports that our users can access through the web or desktop application. What we wanted to do was give our users the ability to take any given section within those reports and create their own.
If there is a report we have built for them but they don't want to see the graph, they can create the same report with out it. If they want to combine parts from 4 different reports to make one summary report they can drag those sections around on our custom builder and save it.
The report builder I had to put together pulls down all the different sub-reports they have chosen and reads through the XML adding them to a Report Builder Template XML file I have created. I then have to aggregate all the parameters so as to not ask for them more than once (parameter names do have to be unique across all reports if you don't want them aggregated). This new report XML is deployed to the server and the users can access them when ever they want.
I've also given them the ability to create their own cover pages, headers, and footers by dragging text boxes, images, global variables (date ran, created, ran by, page number, etc... anywhere on a blank canvas. I then convert all the items they've drug around and resized on this canvas in to another report XML file and deploy it as a sub-report that they can add to their custom reports.
Yes, this has taken quite a bit of work, but our users love it. We're in the process now of allowing them to create a report with special groupings so the report can be ran at different levels.
So it is possible, but there is no easy answer. =) I'd be glad to give advice to anyone who asks, but a direct copy of the code is a violation of my contract, but I'll do what I can outside of that.
I think SQL Reporting Services isn't meant for this kind of customization. You can hide and show controls and subreports, but stuff like interactive grouping etc isn't there.
You might look into a third-party reporting framework like Telerik's.
I have an ASP.NET app that permits Word 2007 document uploads. Once they are uploaded I'd like to parse out the document text and also any comments made by reviewers. I'd like to be able to get the comments and the commenter initials/name.
Are there free libaries to do this? I prefer not to automate Word as this process needs to be somewhat scalable..
DocX (check codeplex) might do what you need. I know you are looking for free, but if you find that you need more features (97-2003 support, for example) than you can find in free offerings, take a look at Aspose's products. I rely on their .NET suite for a number of commercial apps and have been, overall, very happy with it.
If you require that your users upload Word 2007 DOCX files (as opposed to Word 2003 .doc files), you can use the System.IO.Packaging API in WindowsBase.dll to read the XML within the Word 2007 file (See here)